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A novel in the too-near future about a boy born forced to use the underground to rescue his brother, his friends, and most importantly - his work.
Quote:
"Fed was 18 when Tony got roo'd. He'd been prepping for early college admission with late-night com-classes, goggled in and finger-cramped over nasty circa-2009 C++ code examples while longing to toss it in for time to scan some flashy Java virii. Tony had been gone from his life for at least a couple years, five years his senior and a failure, as far as their folks saw it. Bailing out of a prestigious single-course curriculum at MIT, the rumor was that he'd crashed and burned on Pakistani kraft; carefully engineered cold cells delivering a prolonged payload of top-flight methamphetamines directly to the spongy flanges of his right hemisphere."
Quote:
"Fed was 18 when Tony got roo'd. He'd been prepping for early college admission with late-night com-classes, goggled in and finger-cramped over nasty circa-2009 C++ code examples while longing to toss it in for time to scan some flashy Java virii. Tony had been gone from his life for at least a couple years, five years his senior and a failure, as far as their folks saw it. Bailing out of a prestigious single-course curriculum at MIT, the rumor was that he'd crashed and burned on Pakistani kraft; carefully engineered cold cells delivering a prolonged payload of top-flight methamphetamines directly to the spongy flanges of his right hemisphere."
Reviews
Reviewer:
Kyle H
-
favoritefavoritefavorite -
July 27, 2008
Subject: A ruby in the rough
Subject: A ruby in the rough
The upside: Hackers can get it. Not just coders, but also biotech.
The downsides: You don't learn until halfway through what being "roo'd" actually is. There's a fair amount of deus ex machina. There's far too much jargon (it's nice not to have my fiction watered-down, for once, but the high jargon level makes its audience extremely limited).
It seems to be set in a near-future that is very much like _Jennifer Government_ or _Snow Crash_: certain trans-national corporations have achieved Statehood (as in, they are their own independent nations). This includes Disney, quite possibly a play on the fairly-common phrase Mickey Mouse Mafia.
The book starts fairly slowly, plunging the reader into long, fairly pointless exposition of the setting -- perhaps echoing the long, pointless, boring lengths of time that Fed spends trying to hack the corporatized system that has all but taken over this dystopian future. He's got everything -- if you count "a mother who's borderline bipolar, a brother who dropped out of MIT who he hasn't heard from in over five years, a father who drifted out of his life, and only a place to live and relatively underpowered computers to learn to code on so that he can get through school and become a corporate computer security flunkie" as "everything".
Eventually, he meets up with his brother Tony (now called Tonx) again through one of his mother's chronic boyfriends. His brother, it turns out, has something of a genius for biotech -- but he needs more computing power than anyone's got available in order to crunch the numbers fast enough and well enough to make that genius come to life.
Anyone, that is, except China.
Fed learns to tap into "the zone" and designs a virus that will take over many of the systems in China, running a massively-distributed genetic algorithm on a genome. The hack works, but the output is not what they expect -- someone high up in China's IT department has caught them, and now holds the data they need hostage.
And now they need to get it back.
I like the story, I really do. I just wish it were a LOT more polished -- and with the level of detail in the jargon presented (all of which actually fits, which belies a fairly strong grasp of the subject matter), there's no way any editor would be willing to buy this and polish it the way it needs to be treated. Not everyone is a domain expert on programming or biotech, and since the conversations explaining what is going on are heavily jargon-centered, it's very difficult to remove that without it seeming like very advanced magic.
However: This is a story where the protagonist makes choices, rather than being railroaded into action after mindless action. The characters are believable (assuming you can accept the standard suspension of disbelief necessary to read a cyberpunk novel), and I would very much like to see more of this type of story.
I just wish it weren't presented so densely. The amount of text on each page in the PDF version easily could have been spread over 4 pages in a standard manuscript format -- which makes its 126 pages really more like 504. The author could really, really stand to learn what can be taken out after a story is complete, so as to reduce the reading level requirement and make the matter more approachable.
3 stars out of 5: -1 for lack of spellchecking and grammar checking (misspelled and missing words cause me to segfault and fall out of the story), and -1 for density.
The downsides: You don't learn until halfway through what being "roo'd" actually is. There's a fair amount of deus ex machina. There's far too much jargon (it's nice not to have my fiction watered-down, for once, but the high jargon level makes its audience extremely limited).
It seems to be set in a near-future that is very much like _Jennifer Government_ or _Snow Crash_: certain trans-national corporations have achieved Statehood (as in, they are their own independent nations). This includes Disney, quite possibly a play on the fairly-common phrase Mickey Mouse Mafia.
The book starts fairly slowly, plunging the reader into long, fairly pointless exposition of the setting -- perhaps echoing the long, pointless, boring lengths of time that Fed spends trying to hack the corporatized system that has all but taken over this dystopian future. He's got everything -- if you count "a mother who's borderline bipolar, a brother who dropped out of MIT who he hasn't heard from in over five years, a father who drifted out of his life, and only a place to live and relatively underpowered computers to learn to code on so that he can get through school and become a corporate computer security flunkie" as "everything".
Eventually, he meets up with his brother Tony (now called Tonx) again through one of his mother's chronic boyfriends. His brother, it turns out, has something of a genius for biotech -- but he needs more computing power than anyone's got available in order to crunch the numbers fast enough and well enough to make that genius come to life.
Anyone, that is, except China.
Fed learns to tap into "the zone" and designs a virus that will take over many of the systems in China, running a massively-distributed genetic algorithm on a genome. The hack works, but the output is not what they expect -- someone high up in China's IT department has caught them, and now holds the data they need hostage.
And now they need to get it back.
I like the story, I really do. I just wish it were a LOT more polished -- and with the level of detail in the jargon presented (all of which actually fits, which belies a fairly strong grasp of the subject matter), there's no way any editor would be willing to buy this and polish it the way it needs to be treated. Not everyone is a domain expert on programming or biotech, and since the conversations explaining what is going on are heavily jargon-centered, it's very difficult to remove that without it seeming like very advanced magic.
However: This is a story where the protagonist makes choices, rather than being railroaded into action after mindless action. The characters are believable (assuming you can accept the standard suspension of disbelief necessary to read a cyberpunk novel), and I would very much like to see more of this type of story.
I just wish it weren't presented so densely. The amount of text on each page in the PDF version easily could have been spread over 4 pages in a standard manuscript format -- which makes its 126 pages really more like 504. The author could really, really stand to learn what can be taken out after a story is complete, so as to reduce the reading level requirement and make the matter more approachable.
3 stars out of 5: -1 for lack of spellchecking and grammar checking (misspelled and missing words cause me to segfault and fall out of the story), and -1 for density.
